By LISA ROSMAN
May 26, 2017
For years, Hollywood kept trying to find the new Julia Roberts, and for years – decades, even – it kept failing. With her endless legs, auburn mane, and megawatt smile, she had been the perfect concoction for 1990s silver screens – hot as a supermodel and, with that unmistakable cackle, as accessible as the girl next door. But trying to recapture her magic missed the point. It wasn’t just that Roberts’s appeal was one in a million. It’s that she was a creature of her time, and the oddly innocent greed of the twentieth century had been replaced by a new-millennium meta-ennui that made her brassy appeal seem grasping rather than glamorous. Enter Kristen Stewart, the biggest female star that Hollywood has produced since “Pretty Woman” hit multiplexes in 1990. Sleeker, smaller, surlier, and slyer, she is the poster girl for our time. She is also one of our reigning queens of adaptations.
Though she’d quietly been nailing it as a child actor for a good decade, it goes without saying that Stewart came on to the national radar when she was cast in “Twilight,” the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s wildly popular young adult book series. With her pale limbs and stammering beauty, K-Stew, as she quickly became known, was the perfect Bella, the human girlfriend of Edward (Robert Pattinson), the emotionally unavailable teen vampire with bedroom eyes. She also offered the perfect antidote to the parade of bedazzled, visible thong-sporting reality TV starlets of the mid-aughts. The irony, of course, is that she quickly became red carpet royalty, a sort of anti-prom queen escorted by prom king Pattinson, her real-life beau. The two were so huge for a time that our current president deigned to scold her in a tweet when she was caught cheating with Rupert Sanders, the married director of “Snow White and the Huntsman,” another adaptation in which she was starring. Rather than spiral into social media tantrums and ill-advised club hookups, though, she grew up. More than that, she dug deep, and so far she’s had the good grace to bring us with her.
No doubt assessing that she’s made enough bank for the foreseeable future, Stewart has focused on indies and foreign films of substance since the conclusion of the “Twilight” saga. They’ve not all been successful but they’ve all expanded her range as well as ours. As a Guantanamo Bay solider who befriends a prisoner, she was the one true note in “Camp X-Ray”; ditto for the adaptation of On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s landmark beat novel, in which she lowered her already-heavy lids as Marylou to hypnotic effect. As the chronically ill sister of a war hero, she grounded out “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” Ang Lee’s under-appreciated adaptation of Ben Fountain’s bestselling novel about the hypocrisy surrounding the American military. And in “Still Alice,” Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s adaptation of Lisa Genova’s novel, Julianne Moore never would have reaped accolades as a professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease had anyone but Stewart played the daughter who lays aside her dreams to stay with her ailing mother. The performance is preternaturally generous in its understatement.
In general, “understated” is Stewart’s name of the game. In the last few years, she’s starred in two films by French auteur Olivier Assayas. In both “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper,” she has played gal Fridays to huge international stars. If another actor had made such a choice, it would seem showy; God knows when Julia Roberts played an assistant in “America’s Sweethearts,” it read as a vaudeville wink. But in Stewart’s case, it seems like more of a showcase for everything she’s observed as other people have been observing her – a road less traveled, maybe. God knows she’s never seemed as comfortable onscreen as she has playing these creative twentysomethings bridling against bigger egos than her own, though she also may seem comfortable because she trusts the brilliant vision of Assayas. Perhaps this is also why Stewart gravitates toward adaptations. A classic top masquerading as a bottom, she may prefer surrendering wholly, but only to material that’s fully formed and already strong. To date, films based upon books offer the greatest cinematic sustenance.
As I write this, Stewart is once again making headlines as a belle of the ball. At the Cannes International Film Festival, tongues have been flapping over “Come Swim,” the short film that marks her directorial debut, as well as her anti-Cannes garb – think short-shorts, gladiator sandals, metallic tweed pinafore dresses, and a strapless bandeau bra from Chanel’s Cruise 2018 collection. As she told The Hollywood Reporter, “If [the festival] is not asking guys to wear heels and a dress, you can’t ask me either.” Like her 2016 “SNL” announcement of “I’m so gay,” it’s exactly the kind of nonchalant candor we should expect if we’re going to persist in putting entertainers on pedestals while Rome burns. It’s also the source of this avant-garde queer’s massive cool. With that lock of hair falling over her forehead, that quiet speech that forces us all to lean in, and those effortless leather coats, she’s not the new Julia Roberts. She’s our new James Dean, our twenty-first-century rebel with a cause.
Above: Kristen Stewart/Photo © BAKOUNINE/Shutterstock
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